Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.'s Blog, page 309

Leave Venezuela Alone

The Los Angeles Times has just published an article that proposes a way for the U.S. government to oust Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro from power: “The harshest possible sanctions must be leveled against Maduro and all state-owned industries to make an exit plan his best option.” The article was authored by Kristina Foltz, “a researcher and writer based in California and Colombia.”

Wow! What a brilliant idea! Ingenious, really. Why didn’t anyone think of that idea before now?

Oh, wait a min...

‘Karbala Is the Path to Al-Aqsa’: an Iraq Diary

BAGHDAD and KARBALA – Arriving in Baghdad today comes as an electric shock to any visitor who remembers recent, somber Iraqi history.

There are virtually no checkpoints, apart from sensitive government areas. None of those ghastly cement blocks from the time of the American occupation, forcing a slow slalom every few minutes. No sense of unpredictable danger capable of striking at any minute. Lush greenery thrives all over the capital city. Haifa Street has been rebuilt practically from scratch....

The La-La-Land Fairy Tale of a “Soft Landing”

When everyone finally leaves the La-La-Land casino and abandons the fairy tale, household wealth held in stocks is a fraction of what it was in the heady days of hot hands rotating into the next hot sector.

The reason why a “soft landing” is a fairy tale straight out of La-La-Land is all bubbles pop, and a “soft landing” is based on bubbles remaining unpopped. In the “soft landing” scenarios, mind-boggling bubbles remain at “permanently high plateaus” as gamblers rotate out of one soaring sector...

Mirages

I am sitting on the beach at the National Seashore, a forty-mile long stretch of the Atlantic Ocean seashore on Outer Cape Cod, established in 1961 by President Kennedy.  The wind is whipping hard and the waves are running wildly high against the shore, and, to paraphrase Thoreau – the sand is rapidly drinking up the last wave that wets it.  I am looking far out to the horizon where the sun shimmers on what seems to be the world’s watery edge, creating a strange mirage that I wonder at but find ...

Mother of All Housing Bubbles

America’s bubblicious economy will soon hit another milestone of sorts—-the $50 trillion mark with respect to the market value of owner-occupied residential real estate. At the present moment, this figure (purple line) stands at $46 trillion (Q1 2024), which is nearly 2X its pre-crisis level of $24 trillion in Q4 2006. It’s also 8X its level when Greenspan took the helm at the Fed ($5.6 trillion) after Q2 1987 and a staggering 51X the $900 billion value of all owner-occupied homes when Tricky Di...

The War Against the South

In the past few decades, the federal government has been engaged in a concerted effort to destroy the heritage of the South, and this effort has intensified under so-called “President” Joe Biden and his gang of neo-con controllers. We can be sure that if Kamala Harris takes office as his successor, these efforts will continue.

After Reconstruction officially ended with the withdrawal of federal troops from the South in 1877 following the disputed election of Rutherford B. Hayes, the dominant the...

The Middle East’s Roots Lie in the Fall of the Ottomans w/ Eugene Rogan

This interview is also available on Rumble and podcast platforms.

Modern borders represent mere lines in the sand when understanding the deep history behind the forces that drew them. In the contemporary Middle East, nations such as Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt, and most notably Palestine, cannot be fully understood without delving into the region’s intricate past—especially the pivotal role of the Ottoman Empire’s influence. Eugene Rogan, the Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at the Un...

OFAC’s Banality of Evil: Small US Agency Victimizes Millions of Foreign Innocents

As tourists complete their strolls to the White House from the east along Pennsylvania Avenue, they pass a relatively unremarkable, columned office building that overlooks Lafayette Square — oblivious that, behind its walls, bureaucrats are quietly inflicting poverty, illness and death on innumerable innocents around the world.

The Freedman’s Bank Building doesn’t house CIA or Department of Defense officials, but rather the US Treasury’s little-known Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). Inst...

The Loss of Good Manners

The other day I quite literally ran into a teenager (or rather the teenager ran into me) at our local grocery store.

Predictably, the teenager was looking down on her phone and using a combination of short, skipping, hopping steps and a fast walk to charge down the aisle, weaving between shopping carts and human beings, oblivious of the living, breathing world immediately beyond her phone. Her fingers were moving furiously across the phone which seemed to survive the very hard thrust of her fing...

Could the Zionist State of Israel Disappear Within a Year?

In a stunning interview with Judge Andrew Napolitano, former CIA Analyst Larry Johnson quotes high-level Israeli government officials as stating their concern that if Israel maintains its current warmongering ways, the Zionist State could disappear within one year. Johnson also describes the radical religious zealotry of many Israelis behind the nation’s infatuation with war. (A very similar zealotry exists within a majority of evangelical churches, by the way.)

Johnson also explains why the mis...